Developers of drugs face two general challenges

Understanding how a drug works (i.e. what is the drug’s mechanism of action in a complex biological system), and

Understanding what delineates sensitive biological systems from insensitive systems in order to predict responsive patient populations.

Arpeggio Biosciences uses new technologies - our Clarion platform - to determine how a given drug works (the “biological mechanism(s) of action”) and thereby improve our customer’s likelihood of success when they advance new drugs into the clinic. As a byproduct of that service, we generate a unique data asset that we leverage to identify new druggable targets and molecular markers of disease.

How We Do It

To better understand how a drug works, companies frequently perform transcriptome profiling after exposure to the drug of interest. To generate changes in steady-state mRNA signal, techniques such as RNA-seq require long drug-incubation periods. These long incubation periods (sometimes on the order of days) make it impossible to identify primary targets amid the many secondary and tertiary effects that accumulate at these time points. Arpeggio offers a unique solution to this problem. By combining new RNA sequencing technologies with tailored machine learning, Arpeggio quickly and easily identifies the direct targets (both genes and proteins) affected by a drug. Using this strategy, changes in biological systems can be measured within minutes of drug exposure.